Tuesday, July 11, 2006

The filth stays in the picture....

Directors and studios bosses were celebrating last week as Hollywood won an ongoing battle against companies, which sanitise versions of its films on DVD when a US judge ordered those firms to turn over all existing copies to studio lawyers for destruction within five days of his ruling.

Judge Richard Matsch of Colorado ruled that editing movies to delete objectionable language, sex and violence was an “illegitimate business” that hurt Hollywood studios and directors who owned the movie rights.

The order affects the likes of Utah-based CleanFicks, CleanFilms and Play It Clean Video, Arizona Family Flix USA and another CleanFicks based in Colorado. The fight has been ongoing since August 2002 when CleanFicks of Utah filed a suit against the Directors of Guild of America and 16 leading directors, seeking a court ruling clarifying its right to market the videos on First Amendment grounds. The DGA and directors countersued and by December 2002 eight major studios filed suit.

Utah’s CleanFicks, which is the largest distributor, has declared they will continue the fight against the studios and their right to produce edit ed movies.

I had a look at CleanFlicks and what first grabs your attention is the happy shiny glossy photo of the uber white heterosexual nuclear family at the top of the website. And they sure need protecting from those “evil” directors and studios. They also explain what they remove from films, includes profanity (oh my!), nudity (full frontal and from behind), graphic violence (decapitation, impalement, dismemberment, excessive blood… well based on that diddly squat would have remained of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol.1 and Vol.2 )The same with any David Lynch film, for that matter.

They also remove references to sexual language and anything which refers to the sexual act itself (oh my! I can feel a fainting spell coming on… quick fetch me the smelling salts). And anything, which is “insulting to the deity” (So no taking the lord’s name in vain by screaming, “Oh My God” while fucking thank-you-very-much)

But my favourite has to be FamilyFlix who has “decided to close their doors after 5 years”. This lot regularly hack to pieces films, which show “homosexuality”, “perversion” and “cohabitation”. God (oopps sorry) knows what they did to Brokeback Mountain.

These creepy homophobic sexist God squaders piss the hell out of me. Who are they to decide what people can and can’t watch? They can take their brand of nasty reactionary finger-wagging morality and go shove it somewhere. You can choose whether to watch or not watch a film, it’s up to you. But no way do you impose your own religious morality on everyone else.